Contents

Applications

Ekiga -- Ekiga is a free Voice over IP phone allowing you to do free calls over the Internet. Ekiga is the first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP, as well as audio and video. Ekiga was formerly known as GnomeMeeting.

fswebcam -- fswebcam is a neat and simple webcam app for Linux. It captures images from a V4L1/V4L2 compatible device or file, averages them to reduce noise and draws a caption using the GD Graphics Library which also handles compressing the image to PNG or JPEG. The resulting image is saved to a file or sent to stdio where it can be piped to something like ncftpput or scp.

webcam -- captures images and uploads them to a Web-Server via ftp or ssh in a endless loop

UVC-streamer -- Grabs JPEGs from Linux-UVC compatible cameras and serves them as M-JPEG stream. It is very ressource friendly, most of the time you do not even recognize it in top. It allows to Pan/Tilt the camera, the upcoming second version (mjpg-streamer) will also support motion detection and plugins.

Resources

UVC webcams

USB Video Class (UVC) is a USB standard for "generic" video devices including webcams. This is actually a good thing, because in the past webcam drivers and interfaces were often proprietary (meaning that Linux drivers needed the author to sign an NDA, or to decompile or monitor/sniff USB traffic).

Do you have USB 2.0 controllers on your notebook and desktop? If so, you could benefit from higher resolutions with the Logitech Quickam for Notebooks Pro, Quickcam Fusion and Quickcam Orbit MP. All those webcams are 1.3MP devices and are supported by the linux-uvc driver. Note that the Quickcam for Notebooks Deluxe doesn't fall in that category; it's supported by the spca5xx driver.

Those 3 webcams also work in USB 1.1 mode, but are then limited to 640x480. In that case, you could go for the Quickcam Pro 5000, which is a 640x480 device supported by the linux-uvc driver.

UVC webcams are well supported, but you must be aware of a few issues.

The linux-uvc driver is V4L2-only. This means applications which support V4L1 only will not work. V4L1 is officially deprecated, and have been removed from the kernel recently, so most drivers have or will switch to V4L2 anyway.

The 4 webcams mentioned above compress images in MJPEG for resolutions up to 960x720. This means that applications must be able to decompress MJPEG streams to use the webcam at lower resolutions. Ekiga and motion support MJPEG compression. UVC webcams like the OmniVision OV2640 (built into Dell M1530 and Inspiron laptops) actually *require* MJPEG compression for high resolutions up to 1600x1200, whereas using the standard YUV encoding limits resolution to standard 640x480.